The Essence of Nathan Biddle, page 4
I had gotten to the front of the next house when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned and watched a man run up Mr. Marcus’ driveway. I stood in the shadows looking back toward the house, so the man couldn’t see me even if he looked my way. He first ran under the carport and stood in the dark for a minute or so and then he slinked around to the front door. My envelope must have fallen when he opened the screen door because I saw him bend down as if to pick something up. He looked back over his shoulder and then went through the front door into the house. I got nervous all over again. I didn’t know what I was seeing, but I knew I wasn’t going to go over and ring the doorbell.
I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, so I just started walking toward what is known as the Ragg Swamp end of Bridgewater Parkway. Before they put in the drainage ditches, the area was swampland with a lot of gnarled old scrub oaks. You can get to my house by cutting through Crestview Place and then jumping over the drainage ditch behind Mr. Nacht’s house. Unfortunately, you have to go through Mr. Nacht’s yard, which he had already told me several times not to do. The alternative was to go all the way around Crestview Place back to Carapace, which added a couple of miles to the distance.
I was nervous and getting tired, so I didn’t give much consideration to going around. Crestview Place has mostly large brick houses, much larger than our little frame house that looks like something built when Ragg Swamp was a refuge for muskrats. A wooded area encases the drainage ditch that separates Crestview Place from my street. I thought about going through someone else’s yard and walking along in the woods until I got to my backyard, but I decided against that idea because trying to walk in the woods would be tricky in the dark. I concluded that the only thing that made any real sense was to go through Mr. Nacht’s yard and run the risk of getting caught.
Mr. Nacht has a small white dog that usually barks at anybody who comes in the yard. My plan was to stay as far from the house as possible and hope the little dog wasn’t outside. The plan actually worked perfectly insofar as getting through Mr. Nacht’s yard without being yelled at. I slipped through the pine trees and then cut right and walked parallel to the ditch until I reached the narrow spot. I was about to leap across when I heard a whining noise back toward the house. I stopped and peered into the darkness.
At first, I couldn’t see anything except the lights from the windows of the house, but after a few seconds I could see the little white dog. Instead of barking, the dog was standing with its tail down, whimpering piteously. I took a couple of steps toward the small dog, which cowered and ran not toward the house but along the ditch away from me. It was then I saw that the little dog was tethered to a wire like a clothesline, which Mr. Nacht had strung along the ditch at the very back of his yard. The tether was fastened to the wire so that the dog could slide the hook along the line and run back and forth across the yard. I don’t care much about Mr. Nacht’s dog, but the tether in the dark seemed cruel.
When I was in my room alone, I realized why the dog had bothered me. It was the way he was tethered to the wire. It was basically the same way Uncle Nat had tethered Nathan. I undressed and got in bed. I still felt very uneasy but I was tired. I closed my eyes and I could see Nathan with his long blond hair hanging down in his face, pulling the tether along the cable on the slope Uncle Nat had called Mount Moriah. Nathan was chanting and running, completely oblivious to the dangerous chaos around him. When I see Nathan in my mind now, the face I really see is my own, which is disturbing in a way. I’ve never told anybody that before. I lay there staring into the darkness for a long time thinking about the tether and Mr. Marcus, and worrying about everything. Poccotola train broke down, I kept repeating over and over in my mind.
FROST BITTEN
A few months before Nathan’s death, we went to the city with Uncle Nat for a missions conference. The parsonage of the host church had extra rooms, so the four of us—Uncle Nat, Nathan, my mother, and me—moved in for the weekend. It didn’t go well. Nathan had a bad seizure the first day we were there and then wandered off the next night. He was only gone for an hour or so but he caused a lot of stress. Our host alerted the neighbors, and we then fanned out in the neighborhood.
When I found him, he was standing at a neighbor’s living room window muttering to himself. I shouted, “Nathan,” but he ignored me, and then I saw the neighbors sitting in a swing on their front porch. I explained the situation to them, then we went around to the side of the house. Nathan was standing at the window, staring intently into a large window fan, his head making little circular movements. I don’t know whether I can tell you what he was muttering but it sounded something like:
Esse by a sound,
Evolute abound,
Back into the ground:
Angle back around.
He repeated it over and over, probably five times in the few minutes we stood there watching him.
The peeping tom stuff was on my mind when I woke up Friday morning. The whole peeping tom thing made me uneasy. Not Nathan’s incident, which wasn’t really about peeping, but the guy looking in the window at Mrs. Brasher’s house. I alternated between worrying about Mr. Marcus and fretting over Anna. She was not yet gone, and I didn’t want to believe what she had said, but the truth is she was already getting hazy in my mind. I don’t know how to explain it, but Anna had already begun to seem unreal, sort of a phantasm in my mind.
Since classes at Bridgewater were to begin on the following Tuesday, we could either preregister that Friday morning or we could register on Monday. I didn’t have anything better to do so I talked Lichtman into going over with me on Friday. Since I started going to Bridgewater in the tenth grade, Lichtman has been my closest friend. Until last year when I got tangled up in things and got dropped from the honors program, Lichtman and I had been in the same classes but didn’t become really close friends until we started practicing together on the track team.
That first year we started amusing ourselves with the inverse proportionality axioms. The first one occurred while we were in class. The teacher was warbling on about stuff that was obvious, and Lichtman passed me a note that read: “The less you need to hear the more instruction you get.” I grinned and passed him the following note:
It’s an axiom of inverse proportionality called
the Principle of Quantum Pedagogy. The
axiom is stated thus: The quantum of pedagogy
provided is always inversely proportional
to the quantum of pedagogy needed. The symbol
for all axioms of inverse proportionality is
inversely laid triangles, thus:
After that, we developed a lot of inverse proportionality axioms. If one occurred to us in class or somewhere we couldn’t talk, we would just pass the symbol on a piece of paper. Sometimes that was enough, but often we had fun spelling it out later.
Lichtman is probably in most of the academic clubs at school. I think his mother causes it. You wouldn’t believe the screwball stuff she wants poor old Lichtman to get in. His father doesn’t get excited about anything except furniture. He’s a pretty nice guy but furniture is his life. He talks about furniture like old people talk about grandchildren and, so far as I can tell, that’s all he talks about. He almost killed both Lichtman and me this past summer, loading and unloading furniture. We told ourselves that we were going to build up our muscles and accumulate some money to buy a car, but at the end of the summer we had about as much money saved as we had new muscles, which was almost none.
We get along well most of the time, so the work wasn’t all that bad. Actually, Lichtman and I are a lot alike. He broods about things, sometimes as much as I do. We resemble one another, except he’s tall, lanky, and dark complexioned, and I’m tall, lanky, and light. We tend to think similarly but he’s slightly more quantitative. He says that I think everything can be reduced to a word. He’s wrong. After Nathan’s death, I became so obsessive about prime and perfect numbers that my mother dropped my mathematics tutor for four months. I can obsess about almost anything.
Lichtman and I met at the administration building Friday morning at ten o’clock and went through our course selections. The purpose of preregistration was to simplify the process, but it turned out, as usual, to be total chaos. Instead of fifteen minutes, which would have been ample for normal people, the simplified process took about an hour and a half. I had hoped to run into Anna but she wasn’t there. Instead of Anna, I ran into Coach Kern, the head coach who unfortunately coaches track. He walked up while Lichtman and I were standing in a disorganized line waiting to be shuffled around to more tables attended by teachers who seemed as confused by the process as we were.
The coach wasn’t particularly friendly to either Lichtman or me, but he slapped Lichtman on the back and commented that he had done well with his summer running program. When he turned to me, he said, “You and I need to have us a little chat.” He sort of spat the word “chat” and jutted his chin forward. “In my office, three this afternoon.” His eyes squinted, his brow furrowed, his lips protruded and he raised one cheek in a twisted sneer. I have to say he disconcerted me. “Sure, Coach,” I said, without even thinking about whether I could make it at three.
When we got through the preregistration obstacle course, Lichtman and I went over to the Frost Bite for lunch. The Frost Bite has floors and tables made of stained oak and exposed beams that crisscross the dining area. When we got there, it was full of students who had preregistered, maybe twenty of them girls, none of whom was Anna. Most of the girls were wearing shorts and most of them had on loafers and white socks.
I admit that the circumstances were not optimal for discussing much of anything non-carnal, but I had been trying to get Lichtman to focus on the concept of nothingness. I had tried, without success, to read Being and Nothingness earlier in the summer, and I had come away with nothing (no pun intended), except one strange thing: When I tried to think of nothingness, I had a physical sensation in my head, like some peculiar electromagnetic impulse in my brain. I was thinking that the sensation must mean something, and I wanted Lichtman to try it and see what happened in his head.
During the past couple of years, Lichtman and I had talked a lot about meaning. It wasn’t all that easy at first, because he pretended to know more than he actually did and he tried dropping some isms on me. After he found out that he couldn’t bluff his way through, we confronted some real questions and grappled for elusive answers, but by the end of last year Lichtman was tired of talking about the stuff. He proclaimed himself an existentialist, which, according to him, relieved him from worrying about the opaque wall (which is what we started calling the boundary of our knowledge and understanding) and committed him to defining his own essence. I don’t know what that means or how it is relevant, but okay.
I had a small book of poetry in my back pocket because I was trying to crib some ideas for a sonnet to Anna. The book was uncomfortable to sit on, so I took it out of my pocket and laid it on the table. It really had nothing to do with nothingness, the real subject I was about to mention, but as soon as I laid the book on the table, Lichtman looked at the ceiling with an expression of exasperation and said, “That’s not the Rubáiyát, is it? Biddle, I think you’re losing your mind. It’s a pretty rhyme about the wall, a lot of very pretty words but ultimately nothing but lamentations without answers.” For the record, I would offer that the Rubáiyát wasn’t even in the poetry book I was carrying. “You ain’t gonna find meaning in that rhyme,” Lichtman said. “You want to know the meaning of life? There it is.”
He was directing my attention toward a table across the room. Sarah Burchfield and a girl I didn’t know were glancing at us as they carried on a fairly spirited conversation that we couldn’t hear. Sarah’s older brother Harry, whom Lichtman calls Odious Burch (“with homage and humble apologies to Charles Dickens”), was the first guy I met and my first friend when we moved from the country. It’s hard to believe Sarah and Harry share ancestry.
Harry is a pluperfect ass and general emetic, but Sarah, according to my mother, has the highest measured IQ of any person—student or teacher—at Bridgewater. She’s a year ahead of her age group and she still outscores everybody in the school. She is tall and thin and well proportioned, and happily she has become increasingly top heavy. When I looked up she smiled broadly and tilted her head a little without losing eye contact. She has a disconcertingly sultry mouth.
“Oh, man, Biddle,” Lichtman muttered in a low voice, “Sarah Burchfield’s looking at you like you were a Krispy Kreme doughnut and, as you may have noticed, she’s got two of the largest meanings you ever saw. And she’s very bright, which means, a fortiori, she defies the cranial calibration axiom.” The “general theory of cranial calibration,” as Lichtman and I formulated it, is that the size of a girl’s brain is inversely proportional to the size of her boobs.
I had noticed Sarah’s larval transformation, particularly the more prominent frontal facets. The change was pretty dramatic because Sarah hadn’t been all that noticeable when I first met her. She had pretty auburn hair but she was skinny and formless, with large, almost spooky eyes and dark-rimmed glasses. The girl in the Frost Bite had bubbled out in the right places and nobody would describe her as spooky.
Several years ago, she sent me a note that I never answered. I started to talk to her a couple of times when I was at their house with Burch, but for some reason I never connected. I just wasn’t very interested at the time, and she had actually seemed to avoid me. I waved to Sarah and smiled, but I still had no interest. I had been absorbed with Anna for almost a year and I could hardly fit Sarah Burchfield into my mind. The painful truth is that I had hardly been able to think of anything else since the first time I saw Anna.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m going with Anna, remember.” I didn’t mention that she had given me the old heave-ho or that in effect I may be going with her, but she was definitely not going with me. That is probably some kind of moron, maybe oxy or maybe just me.
“Oh, Lord, not the omnipresent, omniscient, all-powerful palindrome,” Lichtman scoffed. “I read the other day that men have a tendency to see women as objects. The guy who did that study never considered your case. The palindrome is no object; she’s all pluperfect subject. You’ve made her pure, singular and superlative subject. You’ve made yourself the object, totally unmodified and unqualified object. And saddest of all, I doubt there’s a copulative verb anywhere to be found.”
“You’re being an ass,” I said. “Do me a favor and try to focus a minute on something other than your libido. Here’s the question for you: Have you ever tried to conceive of nothingness?”
“I’m trying. Lord knows I’m trying but you ain’t helping a bit. As usual, you’re not paying attention.”
“You’re not understanding the question … .”
“Wait, let me simplify this for you: The burden of your being is to take your hapless existence and create some essence. As you may have noticed, life has handed you a stone. For heaven’s sake, Biddle, roll it and stop talking.”
“I guess you know that makes no sense.”
“You see, you’re hung up on words again. You should love Sisyphus, the noble victim condemned to act out a mundane task over and over, no matter how inconsequential or irrelevant. Sisyphus is a Biddlesque character. Maligned. Put upon. Misunderstood. Noble. Mindlessly stuck.”
“That’s totally absurd, and I hate that metaphor. The mindlessness of rolling a stone up a hill over and over, that’s what I hate. At least running around the track at school has purpose and consequence.”
“Yeah, the purpose is to make the coach happy and the consequence is shin splints.”
“Cynic,” I said.
“Biddle, you’re driving yourself nuts. I’m beginning to worry about you.”
“How about worrying about the subject. And hold the ad hominem.”
“I’ve held it as long as I can. It’s getting harder and harder to hold. I’m tired of the questions. I don’t know why you’re continuing to flog this corpse.”
“I don’t either,” I said after a pause.
“My father’s answer is that if God had wanted you to know more, he’d have told you.”
“Your father is a furniture man.” The instant I said it I knew two things. First, I knew it would offend Lichtman. Second, I knew it was a boatload of irony. Every time he mentioned his father it really bothered me, but I don’t know why.
“That’s amusing coming from you. My father is a furniture man. You are the furniture man, remember? The palindrome has proclaimed it.” As expected, irritation had bubbled up in Lichtman’s voice.
“I just meant that he probably hasn’t thought about this stuff.”
“Yeah, maybe, but he knows what he believes, which is more than you can say for us.” He looked across the room and reflexively I looked too. Sarah and the girl I didn’t know were smiling in our direction. Lichtman gave them his most ingratiating grin. He has a small chip off the inside of his right front tooth. He isn’t really all that chummy but his grin gives him a guileless, homey look. I could tell that he was trying to figure out a way to sit with the girls. We were sitting at a table for two, and they were almost directly across from us at a table, also for only two, against the opposite wall. The room was completely full and every table I could see was occupied. “People aren’t supposed to be unhappy just because they don’t understand everything clearly,” Lichtman said. He wasn’t even looking at me; he was staring at the girls across the room.
“Do you really think people are happy?” My voice was steeped in dramatic incredulity. “Lichtman, it’s a vale of tears. The lot of man is tribulation. We lead lives of quiet desperation. Those are clichés because they’re true. The only people really happy at any given time are those who are temporarily or permanently insane or people who revel in the sheer absurdity of their existence. We’re subject to the laws of physics, which love no one. All matter is treated the same: It generates and disintegrates inexorably.”
